This is how the urban designer from Boston sees Dallas' Arts District.

"As an amazing collection of institutions without much neighborliness or a sense of community," Alex Krieger said Friday morning. "Isolated," he added. Even "elitist."

One major thoroughfare, Pearl Street, dangerously zooms through the Arts District, separating the performing halls from the museums. Its cross walks are long, treacherous. And it's bereft of any indication that it even bisects an arts district. Where, Krieger asks, is the art?

Then there's the dying-tree-lined street that runs across Pearl and through the heart of the Arts District — Flora, which, apparently, is just another word for barren. And treacherous: Its sidewalks, especially those in front of the Morton H. Meyerson Symphony Center and the Trammell & Margaret Crow Collection of Asian Art, have long been hard-to-traverse shards of broken pavers in desperate need of replacing.

Krieger, principal in the architecture firm NBBJ, intends to remedy all that — and then some — with a new master plan for the Dallas Arts District, which will replace the 33-year-old Sasaki Plan that provided the initial framework for the 17 blocks between Uptown and downtown. The new plan will make its formal bow Monday afternoon at Dallas City Hall.

This would look good along Flora Street. It's in the new Arts District master plan. (Should be noted, this identical to a rendering NBBJ used for a project in Cambridge, Mass.)

((NBBJ))

The plan, in the works for almost a year, imagines the Arts District as a vibrant, connected neighborhood filled with shops, restaurants, residences and, most of all, people who aren't simply headed to or from the Dallas Museum of Art or the Winspear Opera House or the other venues that make up the district.

"We have these world-class institutions providing a number of free and world-class programs in their institutions," said Lily Cabuta Weiss, the former artistic director at Booker T. Washington High School for the Performing and Visual Arts who in April was named the Dallas Arts District's executive director.

"But after you see or experience a great art exhibit or show, you want a place to go," she said. "You don't want to go to the parking lot and head out of town. You want to stay, talk about what you've seen and debrief on the art you've experienced."

Among the master plan's key components: shrinking Pearl from six to four lanes as it heads south from Woodall Rodgers Freeway, renaming it the "Avenue to the Arts," extending its curbs into the intersection and adding public art along the route; remaking the sidewalks along Flora while planting better lights, hardier trees and a water feature; and making room for mixed-use developments that would bring life to street level.

The plan also envisions turning the Routh Street overpass into an actual gateway, a plan long on the books but seemingly abandoned. And, long term, the plan would essentially expand the boundaries of the Arts District all the way to the Pearl/Arts District light-rail station and the old Dallas High School, which is being redeveloped by Jack Matthews as office-restaurant space.

"I think it's brilliant," said Dallas City Council member Philip Kingston, whose district includes the Arts District. "Everything he's proposing makes a ton of sense. It's just expensive."

Indeed: Arts District officials put the price tag for the makeover at around $51 million, to be broken up over two phases. They hope to raise $16 million from stakeholders to help fund implementation, which leaves around $35 million for the city to cover. The Arts District hopes some of that — $18.9 million, for phase one — comes from the 2017 bond package.

But on Wednesday, the council made it quite clear it intends to cap that bond package at $800 million, with about $500 million going toward streets, alleys and sidewalks that are crumbling after years of deferred maintenance. The remaining $300 million will have to be spread among various high-priority needs, among them rotting city facilities and perhaps even permanent supportive housing for the homeless, as well as long-planned parks and trails council members and citizens have placed second in line only to long-on-hold infrastructure repairs.

The new Pearl Street. One day. Fingers crossed?

((NBBJ))

And Pearl as it looks today.

There's also a chance, however small, that the May 2017 bond package could be pushed to fall because of the $3.3 billion hole in the center of the Dallas Police and Fire Pension Fund. Mayor Mike Rawlings and other council members have said they're concerned the city could be on the hook for hundreds of millions needed to fill the gap, which could come out of the general fund or bonds.

Kingston said Friday he will push his colleagues to consider funding the entire $18.9 million ask, especially since it's coming with the promise of around $10 million in matching funds for the first round.

"I am hopeful I can get them some money," he said. "I am not hopeful I can get the entire phase one. But I am going to try."

But even if the surface improvements are imminent, Weiss said, Arts District officials will at least begin working with landowners and developers, among them Graham Greene and Tim Headington and Craig Hall, to begin addressing some immediate needs — including street-level shops and cafes, anything to activate barren and lifeless sidewalks. She called the master plan a "road map" and a "vision," even if it's down the road a bit.

And Monday's briefing to the council's Arts, Culture & Libraries Committee will be just the first of many in coming months. The Arts District's board will need the City Plan Commission and City Council to formally adopt the update, as the Sasaki Plan currently serves as the development template per the ordinance that established the Arts District. The new plan will need to slide in there as its replacement.

But Krieger and his NBBJ colleague Alan Mountjoy are quick to say they don't blame the Sasaki Plan for the current state of the Arts District.

In fact, Mountjoy said, "when we dug into the Sasaki Plan, the initial plan had been a much more mixed-use conception, and the actual implementation of the Arts District had become more singular in terms of institutions concentrated in one place. Only now we're seeing other uses mixed into the district, which is a good thing, but the concentration goes against the original Sasaki vision, which was a neighborhood."

Krieger, a co-author of Dallas' Balanced Vision Plan for the Trinity River, said the Arts District was simply sidetracked, then derailed, by attitudes toward downtowns nationwide in the 1980s and '90s, when cities let their centers rot while focusing instead on growing the outer rings. The Sasaki Plan, he said Friday, was actually ahead of its time, imagining a downtown "full of activity, of different people, a mixture of civic uses."

"Our goal is to get people accustomed not to parking beneath the institutions and coming up elevators into into a secure lobby," Krieger said. "That's not the city we want to experience. We want to do what Lily is suggesting and what people are ready for and might not have been 30 years ago — to have a street experience."